I’m excited to tell you guys about a helpful tool called the Speedpay Strategy. It helps you to layout a plan for making additional payments to principle on your mortgage (or really any kind of loan). Its purpose is to help you pay off your mortgage faster than if you just made the minimum payment. Let’s take a look at what this tool is, when you should use it and what you should do before you use it.

Download the Speedpay Strategy in Excel.

What exactly is the Speedpay Strategy and how does it work? It’s a payment plan that uses increasing payments to principal that are based off of customized data that you input into the Speedpay Strategy Excel Worksheet. The Speedpay Strategy creates a schedule where each year the amount of what you pay directly to principal increase by a percentage of the original principal and interest payment. This allows you to anticipate how much faster your mortgage will be paid off and how much your monthly payment will need to be in order to reach your desired payoff date.

Why use increasing payments? One of the best parts about the Speedpay Strategy is the increasing payments. The reason this is a nice feature is because a person’s income tends to rise over time. Think about it, for most people, they will likely make more money next year than they did this year. So, it only makes sense to increase your mortgage payment, if you have a little more income, in order to pay your mortgage off faster.

I created a template for the Speedpay Strategy using Microsoft Excel and this template is available for free download on my website, buildwithkeegan.com. You can find it in the “Success Tools” section. As a side note, feel free to customize the Speedpay Strategy Template to fit your specific needs. To use the template from my website you don’t need to be a wiz at Microsoft Excel. First, simply download the template from my website and open the file. Please note, you will need the program Microsoft Excel in order to use the template. Second, enter in your loan information in the yellow boxes at the top left part of the screen. In this section, you will need to enter your original loan amount, which is the amount of loan that you started with when you either bought your home or when you refinanced. The next amount you need to enter is the current principal balance of your home loan. You can find this amount by either looking online, if you have online access to your mortgage, or by simply looking at the most recent mortgage statement available. Then, enter the amount of the original term. The original term is the number of months that you had at the beginning of the loan to pay back your loan. For instance, if you had a thirty year loan then the original term would be 360 months. Next, input the interest rate on your loan and the principal and interest payment amount of your loan. As side note, if you have a mortgage that requires bimonthly or biweekly payments then feel free to modify the Speedpay Strategy Template to accommodate your situation.

Once you’ve entered in your loan information, it’s time for the fun part! Enter in the percentage amount by which you would like your principle payment to increase each year. You can adjust this percentage up or down to meet your level of financial capabilities. You can also adjust this percentage to show you how long it will take to pay your loan off in a given amount of time. For example, say you want to pay your home loan off in 10 y...